Tcl was driving oil extractions plants in 1995... just an example, also there were bit perl programs in production, so for sure now the acceptance is higher but was not impossible to have sensible code written in scripting languages back then.
It wasn't impossible in 1985, either, when GNU Emacs came out; but the now-common AlternateSoftAndHardLayers approach won Emacs a reputation for being a slow memory hog.
My point, though, is that much of C's 1995 or 1996 niche is now occupied by "scripting languages", and in 1995 or 1996, that niche was occupied by C.
